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68 PCB007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2023 Automation aside, are you seeing general shifts in education or skill sets for employees? e shi in the use of technology and how peo- ple are interfacing with that technology has already started. Business growth is a whole process, and everything is getting compressed into shorter timeframes. It used to take 50 years to find solutions to grow a company; it will soon take five years. at creates a whole different dynamic. People within a company have to understand how to learn quickly, fail quickly, and work together more effectively. ey have to develop new skill sets. ere is going to be a continual retooling of the skills required to make a job happen. How does a potential employee assess a company's culture? e key is to ask questions when you're in an interview. Take time to prepare for your interview and come up with five or six ques- tions on company culture. For example, how do employees collaborate? How is perfor- mance managed? What's really important to the organization? Is it profit? Purpose? How does leadership react when situations go right or wrong? How do communication practices occur within the business? What's the tone of the organization? Any final thoughts or advice? Recognize that we are still in an adventur- ous time. ere are many different influences pushing and pulling people, and all business owners are struggling to figure out where we go from here. Keep positive. Focus on your culture because that's going to be the number- one determination of success. And treat your employees right. Great. Thank you very much. ank you. PCB007 Anybody who has ever enjoyed fresh crab legs or lobster tails can attest to how difficult it is to get through their tough shells. But instead of just throw- ing them away, researchers are "upcycling" these shells into porous, carbon- filled materials with a wide variety of uses. Now, a team reporting in ACS Omega has used this "crab carbon" to create anode materials for sodium-ion batteries. Previously, researchers created a biodegradable zinc-ion battery using the c h i t i n i n c r a b s h e l l s . B u t these wastes could alterna- tively be turned into "hard carbon," a material that has been explored as a possible anode for sodium- ion batteries. Though chemically similar to lith- ium, sodium ions are larger. When hard carbon is combined with metallic semiconductor materials, such as the transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), the material can become a feasible battery anode. So, Yun Chen, Yue Zhao, Hongbin Liu and Tingli Ma wanted to explore how two dif- ferent TMDs—tin sulfide and iron sulfide—could be com- bined with hard carbon made from crab shells to make a via- ble sodium-ion battery anode. To make their "crab car- bon," the researchers heated crab shells to temperatures exceeding 1000° F. They then added the carbon to a solu- tion of either tin sulfide (SnS 2 ) or iron sulfide (FeS 2 ), then dried them to form anodes. The researchers say that this work could provide a route to upcycle other wastes and help develop more sustainable battery technologies. Crab Shells Could Help Power The Next Generation Of Rechargeable Batteries